irregular action would be disastrous
in the extreme; it is because His will is constant, and His decrees
without {114} variableness, that we are able to learn and obey them,
and by obeying to master nature.

"But, after all, He made the laws, and He could have made different
ones." Certainly; but a moment's reflection will show that He could
not have made laws of _any_ kind, disobedience to which would have had
the same consequences as obedience. He might--for all we can say to
the contrary--have made strychnine nutritious, and wheat deadly to us;
but even in that case an indulgence in wheat would have brought about
the unpleasant effects at present associated with an overdose of _nux
vomica_. He might have made a raw, damp atmosphere, with easterly
winds, the most conducive to health; but even then it would have been
rash to take up one's residence in a warm, dry climate. Pain is an
indication that the processes of life are suffering some more or less
serious disturbance; given, therefore, any set of natural laws, and the
necessity of obeying them as the condition of life itself, and we see
that disobedience to them would always and inevitably mean pain. We
repeat that God might have made different laws; but whatever they were,
their breach must have recoiled upon the breaker.

Yet even if reflections like these demonstrate to us the necessity for
pain, we are still left to face those greater calamities and disasters
which sweep away human lives by the hundred and thousand, catastrophes
like the Sicilian {115} earthquakes, that are marked by an appalling
wantonness of destruction; must not such events as these also be
attributed to God, and how are they to be reconciled with His alleged
benevolence? Certainly, no one would attempt to minimise the horrors
of the Sicilian tragedy; the human mind is overwhelmed by the
suddenness, no less than the magnitude, of an upheaval of nature
resulting in the blotting-out of whole flourishing communities. And
yet we venture to say, paradoxical though it sounds, that it is, partly
at least, owing to a certain lack of imagination that such an event
looms so immense in our thoughts. Most of us do not make the ordinance
of death in itself an accusation against the Most High; we are not
specially shocked or outraged by the thought that the whole population
of the globe dies out within quite a moderate span of time, nor even by
the reflection that several hundred thousand person